Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Really fun show for you guys today. We did

something last year. It's a deep offseason topic, but one that I had a lot of fun doing. Just ranking the

supporting casts among every team in the NFL. And what we did last year is we split it into the

AFC and the NFC. and that's exactly what we're

going to do this year. Today is the AFC. And just explaining the details of the exercise, because I think

that supporting cast can mean different things to different people. There are really three different

buckets that Derek and I were pulling from in order to do this. The first was the play caller and

the over-the- the offensive infrastructure and ecosystem.

It's a little bit harder to weight that than it is some of these other things just because

you don't really have talent on paper. But I do think it's a huge, it plays a huge role,

undeniably in which quarterbacks get support and which don't. So just the play caller and

the ecosystem and infrastructure was one part of it. Pass catching talent. Very simple to understand. Right. So how good are your past catchers? How deep is the past catching group? How much star power does the past catching group have? And then the offensive line sort of slash run game, right? Those things play into each other. So the past protection you get from your offensive line, the quality of your offensive line, but also how much can you lean on the running game as part of the overall support system. So those three buckets, how you weigh those is going to be different in what you personally value. I think that you're going to hear that in the conversation that I had with Derek as we ranked some of these teams. There are a couple in here that we're very far away on.

There are a couple that were a little bit contentious.

I think that we both tried to convince each other about a couple teams that we felt like

were too high or too low on these lists.

So really enjoyed this conversation.

Really enjoy doing these exercises.

Hope you guys do as well.

Let's get to it right now.

Thank you. doing these exercises. Hope you guys do as well. Let's get to it right now. I'm already a little bit worried about this based on the pre-show conversation that Derek and I were just having,

but we're doing something and exercise that I really enjoyed doing last year, and I'm very

excited to be doing again this year. I'm not worried about it because I think the conversation will be bad. I'm worried about it, Derek, because I think the conversation in some areas is particularly naughty. I think it's going to be a great conversation. I just there, I was saying before the show, and we'll get to the stretch, obviously. It's seven through like 12, no matter how I

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